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Improve Capture One

Request a new feature, or support for a camera/lens that you would like to use in Capture One.

Status Awaiting review
Workspace Feature requests
Categories Capture One Pro
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 17, 2023

Delete folder (on disk) when empty

What problem do you see this solving?

A minor annoyance when tidying up my photos after a season or a year. Normally my imports go into one folder per day. Some of these are jobs, others are city walks, forest, etc. After some time I like to consolidate those so that ten or so similar forest walks become one folder in the library. I can move photos and rename folders in Capture One and that takes care of renaming and moving on disk. But, when I delete the empty folders the only option is to remove from catalog, leaving a bunch of empty folders on disk.

When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool?

Is this a problem? Well, only if you ever have to look at the disk. I guess I could tolerate a couple of hundred empty folders but if I ever lose something from the catalog and have to synchronize I then have the problem of which of these empty folders might contain orphaned photos.

Current workaround

Are you using any workarounds or other solutions to achieve your goals in Capture One?

After I move all similar shots to one folder using Capture One, I try "Synchronize" on the folder that should be empty, just in case, and then I rename the folder "something-DELETE". Then I remove it from the Capture One catalog. That still leaves the folders on disk but I can look at the names and delete them using Windows Explorer.

It would be nice to have an option like "Folder on disk is empty - Delete?" in the Capture One UI so I can do this tidy up faster.

  • BeO O
    Reply
    |
    Nov 18, 2023

    Regarding your workaround, "Synchronize" does not show you unsupported file types, e.g.  greyscale images or .bmp files. Even if this does not apply to you currently, it is not 100% safe. 
    Also consider a future C1 release might have a small and unnoticed willful change or bug (let's say "don't edit TIFF files" in preferences would exclude them from the synchronization result in a future release).

    A better method to make sure the folder does not contain any files or subfolders would be to select the folder in C1 library tool and then "Show in Explorer" (I even have a keyboard shortcut for it) and look into the folder by yourself.

    Instead of renaming you could also delete the folder in the library tool immediately which will also delete if from the file system. 

  • +2